Cross-channel marketing unifies your brand voice.

With so many ways to connect with your customers, how do you manage all your marketing channels? How do you provide a cohesive, unified voice for your brand? A cross-channel marketing strategy allows you to recognize your audiences, understand their needs, and deliver personalized, rewarding engagements quickly and effectively with a single voice.

Your customers are on a journey. They're on a journey to discover how well your brand meets their demands. This journey does not take place through a single channel. Web, email, point-of-sale, social media, and display all contribute to the story that your customers experience, whether they're on a desktop, a mobile device, or in your store. Cross-channel marketing allows you to manage all those experiences and speak in a unified voice in a personal way.

Break down the silos of multichannel marketing.

Advancing the customer journey through multiple channels is more effective than single-channel marketing. However, the traditional multichannel approach is typically built in silos, each with its own management, optimization, analysis, and reporting structures.

Enterprise managers using a multichannel approach are often looking at metrics that serve their individual objectives:

Display ad managers focus on reach and click through rates

Search managers are focused on impressions

Email marketers look at open rates and deliverability rates

Mobile marketers watch app downloads

Social media managers track the number of likes or followers

But your customers want their experiences to be seamless. To offer experiences where, when, and how your audiences expect them takes a cross-channel marketing strategy. This approach allows you to deliver one-to-one, personalized messaging to targeted audiences by using a single toolset — a unified marketing cloud.

For instance, if a customer uses a mobile site to research a product but doesn't move to checkout, a cross-channel marketer may continue the customer journey by remarketing the product he viewed through display ads on another channel or platform, such as web or social media. Breaking down the silos that separate search from social, email from mobile, and so on allows you to collaborate and manage channels more effectively, and leads to a more consistent experience.

In order to be effective, marketers must evaluate each channel before executing on their optimal marketing mix.

Evaluate cross-channel performance.

In order to be effective, marketers must evaluate each channel before executing on their optimal marketing mix. Performance analytics provide you with insights that can drive smarter marketing decisions.

Adobe Campaign and Adobe Analytics, for example, help you to continually sharpen your focus and fine-tune your messaging, resulting in lower spend for channels that aren't producing results. Attribution models help to define strategies that will improve spend decisions across different channels and programs.

Attribution modeling is used to assign credit to each of these marketing touch points. For example, a user's journey might include:

Receiving an email

Viewing a display ad

Clicking on a sponsored social post

Visiting your mobile app

Purchasing in store

Rather than analyze the performance of each channel on its own, cross-channel analysis allows you to see the impact of each channel as it relates to buying behaviors. In other words, you'll be able to not only identify how many emails have been opened, you'll also discover which opened email led to a visit on your product page, which then led to a purchase.

As a result, cross-channel performance data allows you to adapt content and delivery to customer demand. This can lower cost per acquisition and increase ROI for your marketing campaigns.

Data is critical to a successful cross-channel strategy. Cross-channel marketing provides a high-resolution view of your customers by connecting data from your online and offline channels. An integrated set of solutions, such as those found in the Adobe Marketing Cloud, allows you to integrate anonymous and authenticated data into a single view.

For example, marketers can combine data from mass media activities, direct marketing, and social media conversations to reveal individuals and audience segments who can be targeted for specific messaging. Audience Manager allows you to monitor anonymous customer data from channels such as ad display, search, and video. Adobe Campaign, on the other hand, collects data where your customer is identified, or authenticated.

These solutions are powerful individually, revealing distinct traits and behaviors of the customer view, but they rely on each other to provide a singular, high-definition view. Even more beneficial, data is captured and organized in real time, so the customer view you see is current.

Deliver one-to-one personalization across entire audiences.

Digital natives expect you to know who they are and how to create a story that's personal to them. Cross-channel marketing gives you the vision that allows you to target customers in a personal way. The Adobe Marketing Cloud organizes your data to provide that vision, and the integrated tools to deliver one-to-one personalized campaigns.

For example, connecting campaign management in Adobe Campaign with programmatic ad buying in Media Optimizer helps you to deliver relevant display ads that meet customer needs revealed by actions and personal traits. Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign work together to create personalized campaigns to your most high-value audiences based on dynamic, real-time data like customer location, context, preferences, or use of a channel. And Adobe Experience Manager works with Adobe Campaign to help you deliver the most relevant content at the right moment.

By understanding your customers personally, you can provide a relevant value exchange without being "creepy". Using real-time engagement metrics and campaign optimization tools, you can act on data insights to deliver personalized experiences at the right moment through any channel. Whether it's email, mobile, point of sale, web, or direct mail, you're able to connect individual experiences and present a unified, consistent voice.

Take action where it's needed.

Now that you know your customers, you're able to deliver personalized, relevant messaging. The next step is identifying where your story isn't living up to its potential. Cross-channel marketing using the Adobe Marketing Cloud allows you to make adjustments where they are needed in real time.

Marketing across channels and platforms involves many moving parts, but with channel management, analytics, targeting, media optimization, and audience segmentation combined into a single toolset, you're able to quickly and seamlessly complete tasks such as:

Identifying areas of focus

Segmenting audiences

Testing messaging

Delivering meaningful messages across all your channels

You're able to track conversion rates within customer journeys and respond when your content isn't as engaging as expected. Within milliseconds, you can swap out content or add effective images and copy from your email campaign to your website. As your analytics engine provides insight, you can improve targeting and messaging almost simultaneously.

Cross-channel marketing brings you closer to marketing maturity.

To become more effective at marketing through multiple channels, your audiences must experience a consistent, rewarding journey. Cross-channel marketing unifies your voice through analytics, media optimization, campaign management, and other tools rolled into a single platform. You connect your data across the tools you use to create and deliver better experiences. Using the Adobe Marketing Cloud, you can maximize the returns from all your channels while delivering an engaging, relevant experience.

Adobe can help.

When you share your brand story across offline and online channels, it's important to do it with a unified voice. You're going to need a data-driven, integrated set of solutions to manage it all. The Adobe Marketing Cloud gives you the power to understand your audiences, respond immediately to their demands, and deliver an authentic and meaningful experience.